


Mutual Worry Pact

by EssayOfThoughts



Series: MCU Maximoff Oneshots [178]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Codependency, Codependent Pair Separated, Gen, Pietro Maximoff Lives, Pietro worries himself sick, Quarantine, Trust Issues, Wariness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-13
Updated: 2019-05-13
Packaged: 2020-03-02 08:58:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18807937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EssayOfThoughts/pseuds/EssayOfThoughts
Summary: Six weeks before, the Helicarrier had set down. Six weeks before, several days had been taken to organise things, to rehome the refugees, to figure out what was going on and who was going where and what on earth to do with a pair of superpowered twins. Six weeks before, Vision had carried Wanda to the ‘carrier, her eyeliner running with tears and with wind, had set her down on tarmac and Clint, standing in a doorway sheltered from the wind, had led her to the room where her brother was undergoing emergency surgery and she had collapsed in the sheer relief that he wasn’tdead.





	Mutual Worry Pact

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DragonBandit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DragonBandit/gifts).



> So, here's the thing. Technically, Wanda is the one who's hurt during this, but Wanda is, as she points out in several films, perfectly capable of taking care of herself. So this focuses more on Pietro's emotional state in response to Wanda being less than physically ok, and Clint's concern for the both of them. I hope that's ok for you?
> 
> Many thanks to [Kiterou](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kiterou/pseuds/Kiterou) for giving me the idea I went with and for encouraging me through this, cos it's been a while since I really properly wrote the twins. Still love doing that, though, and I was happy to have a chance again.
> 
> I listened to _Bombs Over Brooklyn_ by Big Data while writing this.

"Pietro," Wanda says, her hand pressed to the glass, her voice tinny through the speaker. "Do not worry yourself sick."

Pietro's hand is pressed so flat to the glass his skin is as pale as his hair and he does not step back. For him, illness is no fear; with HYDRA they had tested it, plugged a thousand tubes into him and let his body fight off every disease they could send at him. His body is too bright and too fierce, now, with the power they poured into it from the sceptre, that it finally keeps up with his mind and his drive to keep Wanda safe. If only he could convince the Avengers of the same.

Wanda is not so safe, is not so secure. She stands in the sterile lab, a sheet wrapped around her shaking shoulders, and Pietro knows she is only standing upright due to the scarlet that is flaring, bright as blood, in her eyes.

"No," he says. She knows what he means, though. What he means is, _Yes._ But what he says is, "No. Do not make me lie." What he means is _You worried the same when I was healing. Do not make me hide that I feel just the same as you did._

She reads that from his mind, he knows. She can't not with the bond between their minds, with her eyes flaring scarlet as a siren. She does not read the conclusion of it, does not read what he feels, because that is summoned up into the winds of his thoughts, too fast even for her to read without a physical connection to bind them.

_Useless. Worthless. Purposeless._

He is glad she cannot see them. It would do her no good to know how he feels right now.

"Pietro," she says, and even the tinny speaker cannot hide her sigh. "I will be fine. They will not let me die. They did not let you."

He relaxes a little at that, but he does not stand down.

 

* * *

 

Six weeks before, the Helicarrier had set down. Six weeks before, several days had been taken to organise things, to rehome the refugees, to figure out what was going on and who was going where and what on earth to do with a pair of superpowered twins. Six weeks before, Vision had carried Wanda to the ‘carrier, her eyeliner running with tears and with wind, had set her down on tarmac and Clint, standing in a doorway sheltered from the wind, had led her to the room where her brother was undergoing emergency surgery and she had collapsed in the sheer relief that he wasn’t _dead._

She hadn’t left his side in the day it took them to get back to America and for Pietro to be stable enough to be taken from the ‘carrier. She hadn’t left his side for the week after, either, as he stumbled back into his speed instead of relaxing into it - letting it loose as he always had before. They’d curled to sleep back to back on one narrow bed for a week straight, and awoken with Wanda curled into a ball in her brother’s arms.

“Stop worrying,” Pietro had whispered into her hair. “I’m fine.” He had taken one hand in his and pressed scarlet-gusting fingers to the scar on his collarbone. “See?”

Wanda had sobbed, and he had held her, and when Clint had knocked on the door to invite them down to breakfast, had seen them curled around each other and crying, he hadn’t judged. He hadn’t thought as so many had thought before and tried to tear them apart.

Instead he said, “Yeah, I know.”

He’d had a brother, he’d said. Estranged, now, but once as thick as thieves, and Clint knew, as well as they did, how hard it was to take when someone so close came so close to death.

This is the only reason that Pietro does not flinch when Clint’s hand lands on his shoulder and says, “Come on. Let’s get you some food.”

 

* * *

 

“He’s not doing well.” Vision’s voice is calm and soft. He’s the only one other than the doctors in protective suits allowed to visit her - apparently vibranium renders him immune to most disease. She wishes she could prove to them all that her brother was just as immune, that whatever she’d been dosed with on the mission wouldn’t hurt him, but she doesn’t have HYDRA’s records and has no doubt that they’d have been destroyed anyway.

She glances over to him from where she’s sat by the window. Whatever it is has dosed her is… well. The doctors say it has a long phase of doing not terribly much and is very infectious for the whole duration. It hasn’t yet become whatever it is when it tries to kill, apparently, which gives them long enough to synthesise the cure, but sometimes she gets terrible shakes and other times she’s fine for hours on end.

Stark had been very insistent that they _would_ synthesise the cure, that they _could_. Helen Cho, frowning and honest, had said, “We will do what we can.”

She appreciates that far more than the gold-glowing guilt of Stark’s mind.

“No,” she says. “He wouldn’t be.”

She’s speaking Sokovian, but over the past two days learned it hardly matters. Vision is… well. She doesn’t think anyone, even he, entirely knows what he is, but he is more than able to recognise a new language when it’s spoken to him, and to learn it as rapidly as required.

“Clint is trying to keep him distracted,” he adds. “Though I confess, he’s not having much success.”

Wanda smiles at that, and sighs, and feels incredibly fond for all she also wants to wring her brother’s neck.

 

* * *

 

He’s not eating much. Clint tries, but Pietro pokes aimlessly at whatever food is set in front of him - if he doesn’t refuse it entirely, which he does a few times before Clint gives up and asks Wanda for advice.

“Keeping kosher,” she’d said. “Pietro never forgets.”

It leaves Clint worried. Oh, he’d worried for Barney, but he hasn’t seen _this_ before, this level of reliance and dependency, this level of utter focus. Pietro doesn’t even use his speed, most days, to slink away to the corner of the Compound where Wanda is kept in quarantine, he simply moves as though he’s meant to be moving away, walks with a calm and focussed certainty that Clint would almost envy but for how it concerns him.

Several times, Clint has visited to find Pietro curled against the glass door to quarantine, fast asleep with one hand pressed to the glass. Several times, Clint has found Pietro like that and seen, on the other side of the glass, Wanda kneeling, head tilted to her brother’s and hand matched exactly.

Even in sleep they hardly move, and when he wakes Pietro, they wake as one.

 

* * *

 

Six weeks ago, Pietro’s chest had been a bloody mess. Fifteen bullets, all in all. He doesn’t keep them. He doesn’t _want_ them, a reminder of what almost tore him from Wanda, and he knows full well that if he had tried she would have destroyed them in rage-grief-loss-anger- _nononononoNO._

Six weeks ago, those at the base had looked on in concern as Wanda had worried herself halfway to sick over her brother, and only abstained from it by some strange precise focus it's becoming clear that her brother lacks.

“He would not want me to worry,” Wanda says, when Clint visits to bring her a book, and show her pictures of his newest child. (Nathaniel _Pietro_ Barton, and he’d asked so very quietly if he could do that, while Pietro healed. Pietro had turned away when he’d asked, had hidden his face in Wanda’s hair when she’d answered. Wanda had said, throat choked with lead and some emotion she wasn’t sure how to name, _Yes._ ) “He never has. He thinks that worry is _his_ duty, not mine.”

“It shouldn’t be a duty,” Clint says.

“No,” she agrees. “But we each have a job. We each have a duty. If one of us protects, one must lead. And if one of us protects, then one must worry. He forgets, sometimes, that because he has me decide what to do, that I must worry over everything.”

Clint frowns, and this, _this_ is why she never tries to explain how they are to others, even to those who might just understand. In the end: they never do. “Wanda,” he says, voice soft and gentle and almost sorry. “You know- He’s his own person, your brother, he can make his own decisions.”

Her smile is wry, at that, and her laugh something far different than she intends. “Really?” she says. “Tell me that when you no longer have to mind him.”

 

* * *

 

“You’ll make her worry,” Clint says, and he thinks it's the first thing to truly get through to him since it happened.

(One week ago, the twins, recovered and trained, had been allowed out on a practice mission. Recon thoroughly done, plan thoroughly worked out, but Natasha, well, Natasha is always right and Natasha had said _No plan survives contact with the enemy._

(One week ago, Wanda had been dosed with whatever was in the canister they were trying to secure after a single remaining insurgent had cracked it with a bullet.

(She’d trapped the smoke with her scarlet and kept them all safe. She’d trapped herself _in_ with her scarlet, and her brother’s yells had made the comms unusable.)

Pietro blinks, and with his sharp-sharp eyes Clint can see his pupils shrinking back in the bright light of the training room. He’s thinner than he was by far. They’ve wondered, a few times, how his metabolism handles his speed - if he needs to eat more or less or the same as anyone. They’re still not entirely sure. HYDRA’s records - those that Tony has saved and decrypted and slowly worked his way through - mostly suggest that Pietro was kept alive by pills and IV drips, except when his sister snuck him food.

 _Delicate constitution not aided by his self-sacrificing tendencies,_ the report reads. So far as Clint can tell, his constitution is actually pretty strong, given he hasn’t yet collapsed despite barely sleeping, let alone eating.

“She shouldn’t,” Pietro says, voice hoarse.

Clint very obviously gives Pietro a once over. The deep bags beneath his eyes, the stubble so thick it’ll soon be a beard, his hair clumped and unwashed. “Sure,” he says. “And I’m the king of Iowa.”

Pietro frowns. Natasha, helpfully from her corner goes, “America doesn’t have kings. They have capitalists instead.” She doesn’t look up from her book.

“She’s worrying,” Clint says. _“You’re_ making her worry.” Pietro doesn’t flinch when Clint’s hand claps down on his shoulder. “She took care of herself when you were healing - to make sure you didn’t do the same. Do the same for her, you moron.”

 

* * *

 

Pietro runs. Not _away_ exactly, because he could never leave Wanda behind, and even when they try to make him get some distance from the base he runs vast looping laps around it, and seems to _try_ to not dwell so obsessively on how his sister is doing. Wanda hears this from Vision, who tries to sit with her at least once a day, because he does not think that it’s kind to leave her alone for long stretches, and from Clint, who visits from the other side of the glass, sometimes, and passes books to Vision to give to her.

It is… soothing, in its way, to have some distance from Pietro. Not completely - never completely - because with Pietro distant she can’t see him or sense him and with how he’d looked last she’d seen him she’s worried more than she really can afford, now that the disease, whatever it is, starts to ramp up.

He has always worried so much, and that resting tension in his mind, the winds that howl and buffet even when he tries to still them to quiet and pretend all is calm is not what she needs right now, for all she desperately wants his presence.

 

* * *

 

“Wanda?” Vision’s voice is soft and calm, and his hands, vibranium as they are, are cool on her fevered brow. “Doctor Cho is here. They have a treatment.”

She’s woozy with the fever, and with her eyes unfocussed all she can see of his face is the magenta of his skin, close in colour to the scarlet of her hands and her eyes. It’s too easy, like this, to slip into scarlet sight, to see minds, and she does not like that she cannot see Pietro’s mind anywhere near.

Even at HYDRA he had been in but the next cell, where she could hear him pace or speak or yell, sometimes, from nightmares and frustration. This is almost like that, in some respects, for all the cot here is not so narrow and is far more comfortable. She is dressed in an awkward shift, and there is a port for a drip in her hand.

“Wanda,” Vision says again, and there is a slight quake to his voice, a moment of worry. “It’s all right. No one will hurt you.”

Its endearing how he says it, and its endearing that his mind believes it, but she is ill and she is _weak_ , too shaken by shudders to be able to stand, too woozy and groggy from fever and flashing scarlet in her veins to fight. She does not trust many, and those few she has built rapport with beyond naive Vision are not near.

She trusts him, that much is true, because she knows he will not lie, but he is new and he is naive, and he has not the cynicism of her brother or the wariness of Barton.

“Wanda,” he says, again, and it is soft and it is gentle and it is barely a whisper. His hand, cool and with slightly less give than that of any human she knows, brushes gently over her forehead again. “We can’t wait with your fever climbing like this.” His hand makes another pass over her forehead as another hand entirely takes hers.

With what strength she has, she snatches her hand back.

“Pietro,” she croaks, her sight spotted and speckled with black. _“Now.”_

 

* * *

 

When Wanda wakes she’s wrapped in a hug. This is not uncommon, though after the last two weeks it is _unexpected_ , and it doesn’t take Pietro long to realise she’s awake and to loosen his grip. His thumb strokes a line across her forehead and some tension in his face eases. He has always, she remembers, taken comfort from her wellbeing, and worried when its anything less.

“They called me,” he says, before she can speak, and she’s missed this, the simple ease of her brother near after two weeks with him far. The simple ease of knowing without saying and answering without asking. It soothes her, almost more than the hug. “I was running,” he adds. “Clint told me.”

He does not say more, just changes the hold of the hug so she can see more easily around them.

 

* * *

 

“Thank you,” Wanda says, when she’s finally able to convince Pietro that he does not have to be her shadow all of the time and manages to find Clint. She glances off in the direction of her brother’s mind, and then back to the archer where he sits on the sofa, tablet on his lap. “He was- Pietro is prone to worrying himself sick. Especially if something happens to one of us.”

“To you,” Clint says. “I told you, I know what it’s like to worry about someone close to you.”

Wanda tilts her head, looks closely at him, in scarlet sight but without probing. He has _some_ idea, yes, what he told them of his brother is not untrue, but it is not and has never been what the twins are, halves of a whole that operate as two sides of the same coin.

“A little,” she says. “Not the same.”

Clint sighs, and flips the cover over his tablet’s screen. Even now there is worry eating at the edges of his thoughts, a black like soot staining and singeing the tranquil purple orb of his mind.

“Thank you,” Wanda says again, before the worry can eat up his thoughts and turn them black and melancholy. “For worrying for him. It kept him from worrying himself too far, I think. He needed that.”

The black edge to his thoughts does not ease, exactly, but it does soften. “You both do,” Clint says gently. “You’re not alone now.”

Wanda’s hands lift and rub at her elbows.

“We are _used_ to being alone,” she says. “Pietro especially. But thank you, for being there. In time, I think, we will learn how to be part of something other than ourselves.”

Wanda’s scarlet tells her before she sees it, the small smile creeping its way across Natasha’s face like a spider across its web.

“Pry him out of his worry, already,” Natasha says. “And both of them out of their comfort zone. Come on Clint. You’ve been meaning to ask them since they got here.”

Wanda frowns at that, and tugs at the thread between her mind and her brother’s. Pietro, ever attentive and still anxious enough to linger close, starts darting closer. He skids to a halt at her side before Clint even opens his mouth.

“Would you like to visit the farm?” he asks.

 

* * *

 

The farm, they learn, is Clint’s home. It is a large house and large fields and a wife and three children and a puppy, now, because Lila begged and Cooper backed her up and Clint was at the base so Laura made the final call.

She’s called Nat by insistence of the children, “Because Nathaniel was a _failure.”_

Wanda is tugged into playing with the children, scarlet sparking from her hands and gaining startled happy _ooh_ ’s and Pietro, with much fussing and much worry, is laden down with the baby and told to _stay put._

He looks across the room, to see Wanda and children and dog, and over at the kitchen where Laura and Clint and Natasha all laugh, and looks down at the baby he’s holding - awkwardly, because the only other person he’s truly ever been comfortable with has been Wanda - and remembers what Wanda permitted because he didn’t know how to say _I just did what was right._

“I will have to worry for you too,” he says softly in Sokovian. “Make sure you don’t end up like me.”

 

* * *

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave comments!


End file.
